Alejandro Landes Echavarría makes a disturbing, engrossing film about teenage soldiers, with performances that keep its elaborate imagery from taking over. The vague politics limit it, but the fear and confusion get through.
Monos is a gripping war film with a frustrating reluctance to tell us what its war is about. Alejandro Landes Echavarría puts a group of teenage soldiers on a mountain and watches them train, compete and invent ways of living together. They have a captive, Doctora, played by Julianne Nicholson, but much of the early tension comes from the group’s own uncertain rules. The film is interested in what happens when young people are given power over one another before they have much control over themselves.
Moisés Arias gives Patagrande a hard, challenging presence, while Sofia Buenaventura lets Rambo’s uncertainty remain visible. The young ensemble makes the shifts between playfulness and cruelty credible, without suggesting that these are neatly separable parts of their personalities. The training drills made us uneasy, because the bodies learning military discipline still have the restless energy of adolescents. We can see why belonging to this group might matter to them, which makes their willingness to hurt one another harder to dismiss.
Jasper Wolf’s cinematography gives the mountain a scale that makes the soldiers look exposed. The wide compositions and the attention to light make looking at this place a pleasure, and that pleasure becomes uncomfortable once we remember who lives there. Daniela Schneider’s production design keeps the group’s shared spaces from competing with the terrain, allowing their occupation of the place to look temporary and precarious. At times the image is so insistently beautiful that the children seem at risk of becoming another feature of the scenery.
Mica Levi’s percussion prevents that beauty from becoming restful. The score gives the film an irregular, agitated pulse without providing the familiar reassurance that music can offer in a thriller. Editors Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Santiago Otheguy and Ted Guard keep the action moving briskly, while allowing the drills and group rituals enough time to register as behaviour. Their work matters because the film asks us to learn these relationships largely by watching bodies in motion, and we rarely struggle to follow who has the upper hand.
Julianne Nicholson gives Doctora a watchfulness that helps keep the danger concrete. With a captive among them, the teenagers’ experiments in authority have immediate consequences for somebody who cannot simply opt out. The performance avoids telling us exactly how we ought to feel about her captors, and Nicholson holds our attention without competing with the young ensemble. It also makes the screenplay’s evasions more noticeable: Alejandro Landes Echavarría and Alexis Dos Santos give us a compelling immediate predicament, but little sense of the larger conflict that has put these people together.
That lack of context is the chief limitation. A war drama need not supply a history lesson, but here the missing information lets the film fall back too often on the familiar proposition that people become cruel when ordinary restraints disappear. The young cast makes individual loyalties and resentments convincing enough that we want to know more about these particular soldiers. During some of the more forceful passages, the noise and movement labour to make us feel a danger already clear in the performances.
Still, at 103 minutes, Monos holds our attention without exhausting the uncertainty that makes it frightening. It makes being young inside an armed group feel unstable in ways that a tidier, more explanatory film might miss. We recommend it, with the caveat that anyone looking for a clear account of the conflict will have to look elsewhere.
